Searching for Spiegelman

Margo Roth Spiegelman refers to herself as Margo Roth
Spiegelman. Not plain Jane Margo. 'Go' is a no go. The mystery thickens since her parents are just "The Spiegelmans." Is “Roth” her middle
name or is it some self-attributed prefix like “von”? Margo Roth von
Spiegelman. Let’s call her by that name now, too, to make this review a little
more John Greeny.

That name probably makes sense, especially since Margo Roth
von Spiegelman has this quirk in which she haphazardly caPitaliZes LeTters in
hEr pRose becAUsE She thInks lEtTers in the miDdle of a wOrd And/oR Sentence
desErve the Upper casE. Cute. The point of the matter, though, is that Margo
Roth von Spiegelman isn’t a person: she’s a character, a construct, and a
self-conscious construction who exists only to draw attention to the fact of
her constructedness.

Margo Roth von Spiegelman exists as a fantasy babe for Paper Towns’ lovelorn schmuck Quentin
(Nat Wolff, who played the Jar Jar Binks character in The Fault in Our Stars). Margo Roth von Spiegelman (played by model
Cara Delevigne) doesn’t remotely resemble a human being in Paper Towns from beginning to end, as Quentin recalls their
childhood together and his unending infatuation with her since the time they
discovered a dead guy as kids. The Margo Roth von Spiegelman of
Quentin’s imagination explodes when she invites him to join her on a fateful
night that sets in motion a treasure hunt that begins when Margo Roth von Spiegelman
disappears. Said disappearance puts Quentin on a circular quest as he traces
the clues to discover the real girl inside the Margo Roth von Spiegelman of his
mind.

The faulty logic of Paper
Towns never adds up since the film mixes metaphors in this noticeably
abbreviated adaptation of the novel of the same name by The Fault in Our Stars author John Green. Towns are paper and Margo
Roth von Spiegelman is paper, but nobody sees the real thing because screenwriters
Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (who also adapted Faults) whittle away the majority of clues that Margo Roth von Spiegelman
drops when she runs away from her home in Orlando, Florida and leaves hints for
her whereabouts that Quentin interprets. This lessening of the book isn’t
necessarily a bad thing, though, even if the adaptation of Paper Towns doesn’t have much substance. Paper Towns is better than the book, mostly because it doesn’t make
one read Green’s prose, as it provides fast and breezy coming-of-age
escapism and tries to reveal how everyone lives in self-constructed realities.

This adaptation of Paper
Towns zeroes in on the most entertaining part of the book, namely the
climactic road trip in which Quentin and his buds Ben (Austin Abrams) and Radar
(Justice Smith), along with Margo Roth von Spiegelman’s sort-of-ex-BFF Lacey
Pemberton (Halston Sage) and Radar’s girlfriend Angela (Jaz Sinclair), follow
the clues to Margo Roth von Spiegelman’s hiding place. (Angela doesn’t get to
join the party in Green’s book, so Paper
Towns makes an effort to diversify white bread Orlando.) The road trip only gets about fifty pages in the
book, but it accounts for half the movie and it makes for fun, broad strokes of
harmless humour as Quentin and co. grow up and discover themselves as they try
to learn Margo Roth von Spiegelman in turn. Paper
Towns is a John Hughes movie on cruise control and that’s perfectly fine.
Director Jake Schreier (Robot & Frank)
adds a funky indie soundtrack and a winning cameo from Augustus Watters to make the film resonate with die-hard fans of the book.

However, while Paper
Towns makes its journey shorter and tighter by cutting out much of the overdrawn
search through maps, books, Walt Whitman verses, and (most curiously absent)
paper towns in the Orlando area, Paper
Towns consequently erases the enigma of Margo Roth von Spiegelman on which
the premise of the search hinges. Every clue points to both life and death as
Quentin returns to the image of the strings that Margo Roth von Spiegelman
describes as severed in the dead man they find on the street. The dead man
also fails to reappear in the film’s conclusion, so Quentin never puts to rest
the Margo Roth von Spiegelman of his imagination. He just adapts.

The book
gives readers a damaged, lonely, misunderstood, and potentially suicidal young
woman whose fate makes Paper Towns a
decent page-turner. Her highlighted Whitman book points to blades of grass as
lonely leaves, while Quentin discovers they’re also a metaphor for
interconnectedness. Margo Roth von Spiegelman doesn’t really get the literature with which she creates her own mystique, but she thrives on a dream and drive for escape that Paper Towns, the movie, desperately needs for Margo Roth von
Spiegelman to be anything other than a one-dimensional spoiled brat who thinks
she’s all that and a bag of gluten-free potato chips.

Delevigne lacks the screen presence to make Margo Roth von
Spiegelman remotely engaging, while Wolff’s wide-eyed ho-hum shtick makes
Quentin even less of a believable character. They’re both quite self-aware yet forgettable
performances, which mark the most significant decline for this year’s John
Green movie after Shailene Woodley and, to some extent, Ansel Elgort set a high
bar by creating dynamic and emotionally engaging leads in The Fault in Our Stars. Abrams and Smith, on the other hand, are
fun as Quentin’s buds, although both feel like caricatures of high school movie
clichés: Ben’s the token horny virgin while Radar mostly functions to introduce
a running black joke. Admittedly, the gag that his parents own the world’s
largest collection of black Santas inspires a chuckle, but each punchline hits the
aforementioned point home. The closest things to human beings scattered
amidst the paper peeps of Paper Towns are Sinclair and Sage, the latter of whom is arguably a star in the making and might have given the film that Margo it needs.

Paper Towns doesn’t
bring the full-scale cheese of The Fault
in Our Stars, nor does it inspire the same mass catharsis/hysteria, and while
one appreciates the lack of sloppy cry-faces at the movies, this film lacks a spark. By the end, Paper Towns leaves audiences with a feel
good high school comedy in which Quentin graduates to a different idea of Margo
Roth von Spiegelman. She’s still a construct, though, and a variation of an
idea that doesn’t come to fruition in a latter-act explanation. Margo Roth von
Spiegelman, ultimately, is an elusive figure who might as well stay lost.